Rehab center revelations.

A few weeks ago I got a text from a friend...

The rehab place where I worked and quit was in the local paper for getting the highest class of fine from the state for some stuff that happened during the first quarter of the year, where someone was falling repeatedly and they didn't figure out a way to prevent it!

I'm shocked, but I'm also not surprised.

I could see that post-Omicron staff churn was breaking down basic continuity of care for patients.

It really does make me glad that I'm out of it, and I do wonder how long it will take for some normalcy to return... 

I was telling this to the one (older) (female) bartender at the one patio brewery that I go to, and she was shocked, since the place has a reputation as one of the best in the area.

She also said that she was going to get her hands on the article to send it along to her daughter, who's a nurse and who used to work there in a lower-level job way back when.

It really is surprising, how many sectors of the economy have just gone to hell the past ten or fifteen years.

Like I was telling my mom, in situations with understaffing places are theoretically supposed to raise wages to attract new employees, but instead they continue to pay low wages, work their current staff to death amidst understaffing, and then try to move on and get new employees, all while they hemorrhage all that time and money on training and produce really bad outcomes, and, in healthcare, even deadly ones.

When you've raced to the bottom and ended up with a churn model of staffing like Amazon warehouses and have a ton of new staff or fill-in staff from agencies and people quitting all the time, you just don't have people passing along information on patients, or people who know the patients. It really makes you wonder how a place can continue to function like that (and the secret is, they can't).

Farmers market happenings.

The other week at the farmers market, I was commenting to a(n old) (scrawny) (sunburnt) (white) woman who was working the stand, how good their smaller size tomatoes are.

She said it was a new varietal, but "you don't see 'em too much since they're stingy with the seeds."

Watermelons are also coming in, and ahead of me were these two (middle-aged) (white) women who were saying that they had just moved here from Utah, and one of whom was holding a toddler while the other was pushing a babystroller with a watermelon in it.

"What happened here?", I was like. "Did you trade a baby for a watermelon?"

"Oh no!", the one was like, and she explained to me that the watermelon was heavier than the baby, so it made more sense to push the watermelon and hold the baby.

Noise confusion.

The other week, someone mentioned to me that they love the sound of cicadas at night here.

I wonder if the tree frogs that I've been hearing here, are actually cicadas?

That might also explain that weird pale green grasshopper thing that I saw crawling up a tree the other night.

Addendum.

Near where I live now, there's this big shuttered hotel right by downtown that's like from the 1920s or something, and the one (lesbian) sister of my one assisted living client with disabilities has told me that she's had a bad feeling whenever she's been over by the entrance.

So, the other week I mentioned to her that I saw that it's being renovated, and that it should be opening relatively soon.

"I wonder if anything haunted is going to happen there," I was like.

"I know!", she was like, and then she said that she'd been wondering that herself.

Some ghost anecdotes...

...of the one (lesbian) sister of my one former assisted living client with disabilities:

Back when she had her first apartment after moving out, this attic apartment that she shared with her first girlfriend in the attic of this one house that some family member of hers owned and lived in, there was this one room that gave everyone the creeps, and she'd watch whenever anyone would first enter the apartment, and as they'd go down that hallway, they'd slow down as they passed by and looked into that one room, and then all of a sudden subconsciously they'd speed up and walk faster to get by it, every single person.

And, another time her one family member called her at work to ask her if her girlfriend was home since it was noisy upstairs, and she said no, she was at work, and then when she asked what the sound was like, he said that it was like bodies being dragged across the floor, and when she said to go look, he was like, "No, you go look," and her relative who lived downstairs was the kind of person to not make stuff up or do anything like that at all.

Also, many times when she got home, the picture of her (dead) mother would be flung across the room and resting face down in the corner of the room opposite where it had been sitting out on a little table.

Returned perception...

 ...by my one (lawyer) friend from (Missouri), after her recent trip to Spain (her first big trip since the pandemic started!).

First, she can't believe how chaotic the city is, the one where she still lives and where I used to live in; she honestly thinks it will take like ten years for it to get back to normal, she's saying now.

(On another note, after yet another article about increased violent crime there on public transportation, my one [Spanish] language coordinator friend told me she's glad that I moved and am safer now.)

Second, my one (lawyer) friend from (Missouri) is convinced from talking to people there that the urban crime uptick is mainly an American thing; she says that people she talked to were really, really affected by Covid, and many had dead relatives that they were still mourning, and one (older) woman in Barcelona said that the younger generation has it horribly economically, but when she asked people if the city changed somehow, like with chaos or crime or whatnot, everyone was like, "No."

I was saying to her, then, that a lot is Trump, and that he just set people against each other and riled people up, and it's going to take a long time to recover from that, socially.

Grocery store conversation:

As I check out, the (older) (shorter) (shorter haired) (white) cashier comments on the gallon pickle jar I'm buying - "You sure like pickles, huh?" - and then I clue her in to what a good brand it is, and then she tells me that some people really like Nathan's brand pickles like they carry in the refrigerated part of the deli, and that she watches the hot dog eating contests on TV, though she isn't really sure how they do it, and it kind of grosses her out sometimes.